Eyes wide open.

Arthur Schnitzler Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas. Translated by Margret Schaefer. Ivan R. Dee, 272 pages $28.50

A haze of nostalgia has blanketed fin de siecle Vienna since 1941, when The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig's elegy for the "Austrian-Jewish-bourgeois culture that culminated in Mahler, Hoffmannsthal, Schnitzler, and Freud" first appeared. The Viennese bourgeoisie in the 1890s were, after all, the most cultivated and refined middle class in the world, and they set an all but unassailable benchmark in cultural accomplishment. It was an era of relative innocence: the assumptions of the Enlightenment and faith in the ideal of human progress were unquestioned; the empire's endemic anti-Semitism had been in abeyance for two decades; the tremors of the tottering Hapsburg monarchy were easily ignored. Zweig described this "golden age of security" as an age of reason in which radicalism and violence seemed impossible.

The irrational was relegated to the psyche. Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud were charting the murky psychological depths of the haute bourgeoisie with equal intensity. Yet Schnitzler's depictions of Viennese neuroses in his fiction and drama were far more empathetic and, in their ambiguity, subtler than Freud's more objective and definitive case studies. For fear of being unduly influenced, Freud was reluctant to read his fellow doctor's work. He even avoided meeting Schnitzler for many years, confessing to the latter that he had done so out of a kind of Doppelgangerscheu or apprehension before his psychological double. Indeed, many of the psychological mechanisms analysed by Freud--the transmutation of desires and fears in dreams, hysterical manifestations of repressed libidos, the conflicts of eros and thanatos--are described intimately in Schnitzler's works.

Schnitzler, born to a noted Viennese laryngologist in 1862, pursued the medical career expected of him dutifully but without enthusiasm, abandoning it as soon as he was able to support himself with his writing. His literary success was initially de scandale. He was unflinching in his depiction of the moral hypocrisy of the era's sexual double standard, as well as the futility of the cult of dueling, which, although illegal, was central to the code of honor. In 1900, his short story "Leutnant Gustl" the interior monologue of a blustering subaltern justifying his fear of fighting a duel, so incensed the military establishment that Schnitzler was cashiered from the reserves. Reigen, a sexual morality play often overlapping amorous encounters, culminating in dotted lines and lowered curtains, was published in 1903 but banned from the stage until 1920. Even then, the premiere caused a riot and the play was banned for a further year. Neither the prostitute in the first and last vignettes, nor the characters' promiscuity and the implied connection to the dance of death of spreading syphilis outraged the public as much as the predatory indifference with which the characters discard one another once their conquest is complete. Schnitzler's depiction of his era's underbelly was simply too accurate.

Yet Schnitzler's success depended on more than his ability to shock his contemporaries into recognition. His characterization is subtle and complex. And his portrayal of the subconscious strategies used to ward off threats to self-images are timeless in their exactitude.

Night Games, Margret Schaefer's smooth new translation of seven short stories and two novellas, including "Dream Story" provides a much-needed tonic to Stanley Kubrick's interpretation of the latter in Eyes Wide Shut and a reminder of the depth of Schnitzler's insight into the human character. Schnitzler knew his limitations. He noted in his diary that although he would never be one of the great writers, he was nonetheless quite confident that his capacities included "poetic elements of the first rank" These elements are very much in evidence in this collection.

His finely modulated interior monologues chart the evolution of his characters' self-knowledge. Each insight into oneself brings an immediate, compensatory shift in self-deception. In "The Widower" a young husband learns that his wife has betrayed him with his best friend, and we follow his progression through shock, indifference, rage, and rationalizing of his own infidelities, to a ...